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Hi everyone!

You may or may not know this already, but we just moved to a new office. Some of you visited us in the Paradox Tower (we had a fan gathering at our office some years ago) and while we’re missing the great view, the new office is fundamentally better in terms of layout. Now we can actually sit the whole team in one place including two integrated QA (in the previous office QA had to sit on another floor). Also, we’re sitting next to a coffee machine so production efficiency is up 10%.

Today I’m going to spoil a minor usability improvement we’ve done for the patch. I had Nusia coming into the team with me for this expansion and he quickly got annoyed by how much work it was to go to the character owning a province. Thus he did some improvements and now you can right-click a province to go to the character owning that province. Shift+right-click take you to the top liege of the province, so no more clicking a character and then clicking the liege and then clicking the liege. Alt+right-click will open the interaction menu with the character owning the province. Finally alt+shift+right-click opens the interaction menu of the top liege. War declarations have never been this easy.

Since right-clicking doesn’t make for great screenshots, I’ll post a picture of the team in the new office instead.
IMG_20151027_092805.jpg


Also a bonus for this week! The new office has a sound studio, meaning that Björn, our sound designer, (who haven't had the opportunity to work with CK2 a lot before) can produce a lot more audio assets. Just now we crammed the team into a shoe box and recorded some crowd ambiance sounds. That was 5 minutes ago, so I can't share anything, but here's a work in progress of one of the new audio assets.
 

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Congrats on the new office. Can we get a caption identifying who is who in the picture? I recognize a few but not everyone.
index.php

From Left to Right they are;

Moah, Rageair, Dorimeh, Birken, Groogy, Divine, Servancour, The Witch-King, Nusia, MooFC
 
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More backstory: Right-clicking on provinces in EU4 brings you to the diplomacy view for that country, and since I'm more used to EU4 (and even HOI4) I found the lack of this feature in CK2 quite annoying and had to fix it.
 
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More backstory: Right-clicking on provinces in EU4 brings you to the diplomacy view for that country, and since I'm more used to EU4 (and even HOI4) I found the lack of this feature in CK2 quite annoying and had to fix it.

Annoyance is one of the primary motivators for a coder to work with usability.
 
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I just realized Nusia looks like a evil villain who is smirking as his evil plan is coming to fruition....
 
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When are you ready to share your team's secret (DLC)?
 
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More backstory: Right-clicking on provinces in EU4 brings you to the diplomacy view for that country, and since I'm more used to EU4 (and even HOI4) I found the lack of this feature in CK2 quite annoying and had to fix it.

Sounds great! More usability and ease of use is always welcome. In that same vein you could look into:

1. the plotting interface. auto-inviting is great, but then you still need to click between 2 and 20 times to go to diplomacy screens with different people to bribe and invite them to a plot. and even though you're going through an interface that's telling you "you need to bribe this person to invite him to the plot" the diplomatic action defaults to "invite" and not "bribe".

2. conquest culture of titles. this is a completely hidden mechanic that most players don't even know exists, yet it dictates if provinces can culture shift in certain ways (and sometimes at all). please just add a tooltip to the title screen to indicate whether a conquest_culture has been set for the title.

Anyway, congrats on the move everyone and good luck with CK2, Nusia!
 
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The audio sounds like the Mumakil rider in Lord of the Rings. :D
tumblr_nbmnl3SHmJ1qa5io5o7_r1_500.gif
 
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Congrats on surviving the move.

Yeah it was a bit touch and go at some occasions. Someone even had to get CPR after he saw how awesome the office was.
 
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Another good DD that didn't tell anything what the new expansion is all about, other than more right-clicking. :D
 
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Another good DD that didn't tell anything what the new expansion is all about, other than more right-clicking. :D

Yes, we get it, you want features every week. Clearly they're giving us this stuff until they're ready to start pre-launching the game. You don't have to say it every single diary.
 
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Always nice to read about QoL improvements to the game. Heard the crowd noises and was wondering what the heck the guy was saying in the background. Any explanations?
 
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just make sure to show what alt-right-shift-ctrl-clicking means when I hover over a province, otherwise I'll forget as soon as... ok I already forgot.
 
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